Or, more adventures with the spiralizer gadget.
I wish, possibly more than any other of my many, many, dreamy and impossible wishes, that I was a creature of habit. (Alas, manifestly, I am not.) If you are a follower of Aristotle (and I am), then your habits both reveal your character (eek) and are the only way to go about living your good life.
Philosophy aside, I am constantly trying to start any number of new and sure-to-deliver habits. I am constitutionally optimistic (I guess I have a habit of optimism, then?), and I regularly find new potential habits to fill in all the space left by the forgotten and cast aside shells of habits that didn’t quite stick. Or, in less passive language, stuff that I didn’t practice long enough to make the thing work.
Food is another thing entirely. We could tell a lot about our food character (eater character? dining character?) by looking at our meals. Think about it. We all, even the most erratic eaters among us, have so many food habits. We eat several meals each day. There are kinds of food that we habitually eat for those meals. There are quantities that we habitually consume (which is, for many of us, part of the problem with the stupid food habits in the first place). There are rules that we flout and rules that we follow, and rules that are so ingrained that we don’t even realize we are following them.
According to silly songs my father used to sing in the car when I was a kid, among these rules, in the not-to0-distant past, were a set of guidelines for what people should eat for dinner on each day of the week. (It was like this song, only much more English.) I can’t remember all the days, except that there was a roast on Sunday and… soup on Wednesday? And a lot of the meals early in the week seemed geared towards using the leftovers from the Sunday roast, which made a lot of sense to me because that was actually how cooking in my Dad’s house worked. (We often had Sunday roasts in my Mom’s house too, but due to an infestation of ravenous beasts there were rarely any leftovers.)
I cannot now imagine eating the same thing each day of the week. I have tried pizza Friday, and even that was too much like doing something consistent. But I am now going to try, again. (I think trying to have habits might be my defining habit at this point.) Wednesday is now spiralizer day. It is. Really.
This was yummy and it took 20 minutes, start to finish. I can feel the habit forming as I type.
- 5 medium tomatoes, or their equivalent in cherry, roma, whatever you've got.
- about ½ a bulb of garlic, cloves smashed into bits with the flat of a chef's knife, papery skins removed.
- 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon olive oil
- 3 medium zucchini
- 3 oz goat's cheese
- salt and pepper
- a splash of hot water to loosen the sauce, if necessary
- Heat your oven to 400 F/ 204C
- Chop your tomatoes into quarters or roastable pieces. If using cherry tomatoes, I urge you to halve or at the very least pierce each one, to avoid explosions in the oven.
- Toss the tomatoes and garlic with salt, pepper, and 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a medium skillet. Roast in the oven for 15 minutes, or until soft and bursting.
- Meanwhile, make your zucchini noodles. Trim the ends of the zucchini and spiralize (or slice into ribbons if you don't have a spiralizer gadget). If you trim the noodles after every 6-8 inches, it makes them easier to cook and eat.
- Heat a medium skillet over high heat. Add a teaspoon of olive oil. Toss the zucchini noodles for no more than 2 minutes, or just until heated through and wilted a tiny bit. You want the noodles to have bite, so don't cook much longer than 2 minutes.
- Remove the tomatoes and garlic from the oven, and grind/smear the oil, garlic, and tomatoes into a rough pulpy sauce with the back of a spoon (or tongs, in my case). Add to the zucchini, along with the crumbed goat's cheese. Toss everything to combine, and add a splash of hot water to loosen the sauce if necessary.
- I served this with crusty toast to mop up the sauce, but obviously avoid this if you are trying to develop less bread-based habits.
Discount information
May 26, 2017 at 5:12 amThank you for sharing your info. I truly appreciate your efforts and I am waiting for your next post
thanks once again.
Laura
May 31, 2017 at 9:37 pmYou’re welcome, Discount Information! I’m glad you stopped by.
K
May 28, 2017 at 1:26 pmMy defining food habit seems to be: when left alone for any period of time, will seek out ice cream with neither a sense of shame nor moderation. I look forward to making this recipe this week (though with my peeler, because my spiralizer is not as effective as yours).
Laura
May 31, 2017 at 9:37 pmYes, K, I think this is pretty accurate for you! One of the many reasons we are friends.